The culture of crisis

By D.L. | PHILADELPHIA

SO THE much-hyped protest against the TSA's new airport screening procedures never materialised. That shouldn't surprise anyone. For several years now, the media, led by cable news and the internet, have hyped one crisis, scandal, or controversy after another in quick succession. Ours is an era of technologically-driven perpetual hysteria.

Remember the peak-oil crisis of a few years back? It was quickly followed by a series of economic crises: the stockmarket crisis, the housing crisis, the credit crisis, the financial crisis. Then there was the public-health swine-flu crisis. Today there's the unemployment crisis and deficit crisis at home, while there are EU economic crises in Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. The Korean peninsula is in the grip of a potentially explosive military crisis. And of course the latest WikiLeaks document dump has sparked a "global diplomatic crisis".

Compared to all of this, last week's controversy about the TSA was a minor matter—one perfectly suited to a short work-week and the personal anxieties wrapped up with holiday travel. Today we're on to something else, with a few longer-term fears (terrorism, President Sarah Palin) percolating in the background, ready to explode into full-on horror at a moment's notice.

Sadly, the pattern will almost certainly continue. The rewards that come from magnifying the significance of and threat posed by every event and trend are simply too enticing to resist. Alarmist headlines generate an agitated buzz, which spreads through the culture like a contagion, driving people to seek out information to allay their fears, which in turn generates ratings and boosts page views (and sometimes rates of presidential approval) into the stratosphere, with the most hyperbolic headlines and rhetoric often grabbing the most attention of all.

Apparently, many newscasters, writers, commentators, politicians and bloggers believe their own hype—even those who should know better. The paranoid style in American politics is no longer confined to the radical right as it largely was when historian Richard Hofstadter first diagnosed it in his classic book. It has now spread beyond politics and into the culture at large, infecting nearly everything it touches, transforming otherwise thoughtful Americans into modern-day doomsayers anxiously awaiting imminent civilisational collapse.

This isn't to say that the problems we so readily refer to as crises aren't worthy of attention or concern, or that the word "crisis" should be banished from journalism circles. Certainly the economic upheaval of the past few years is a serious matter, as is the heightened tension in Korea, and "Ireland's financial crisis" warrants its name. This is to say that we would be better off as individuals and as a society if we responded to these situations with equanimity instead of technologically inspired populist panic.